#wee precious flower prince geralt

[bomberqueen17]

liveblogging the aubreyad 1: Master & Commander

ok so. i'm going to liveblog my reread of the Patrick O'Brian Jack Aubrey series of books, in potentially more or less detail, because it's something to do and it's funny. Starting with book 1, Master & Commander, copyright date 1969, which I definitely first read in like 1991 when I was waaaaay too young to understand approximately half the references. There will be spoilers. There may or may not be an accurate representation of the entire contents of the series. We'll see how long I keep this up. I wish I could write it in the entertaining style of my Wee Precious Flower Prince Geralt Witcher 3 playthroughs of yore but those were written under 1) quarantine confinement, 2) incredible amounts of gin, 3) after collaborative sessions, and I just can't make that happen solo.

But I will do my poor, reduced, older and more sedate best. I promise that while these books are not quite as dramatically crack-addled as Witcher 3, they are weirder than you think, which is critical.

OK so. We start off swinging with the meet-ugly. In fair Port Mahon we lay our scene, in the year 1800 (or 1801?? we also start off swinging with never quite having the tiny details quite laid down), we meet our fair hero Jack Aubrey, a six-foot, well-built, yellow-haired lieutenant in the Royal Navy, a cheerful high-spirited cove who immediately pisses off the unpleasant little man sitting next to him at this chamber music concert by singing along to the music. Relatable reaction by the unpleasant little man, to be sure. Aubrey is having a bad time, though— he has not been promoted and he doesn’t have a ship so he has nothing to do but get in trouble, and his spirits are too low to get into a fight with the unpleasant little man, though he briefly considers it. We soon find out that the sole bright spot in Jack's life is that he's fucking his boss’s wife, which seems like a bad idea but who are we to judge. But lo! He gets back to the inn where he’s staying only to find a letter informing him that he has been promoted! He is now the master and commander of his very own ship, which we are informed is a sloop. Also throwing us into the deep end of Listen Baby It’s Just Vibes. The nautical language and technical shit comes fast and thick and if you just sort of roll with it you figure it out. Don’t Worry About It. There Will Be Context Clues.

Now that Jack is professionally fulfilled he is happy, and so the next morning when he happens to see his unpleasant little man from the previous night, he shows his true colors: he immediately bounds across the street and wholeheartedly, unreservedly apologizes for being a dipshit, like the golden retriever he really is at heart. The unpleasant little man is so shocked by this that he loses all his unpleasantness, has a really nice conversation with Jack, and immediately gets distracted by the sighting of a rare bird. Stephen Maturin is now successfully introduced, exactly as he means to go on as well. He is a physician, but his patient died and he's stuck without money to get home, literally sleeping rough because no one will answer his letters and he's out of cash. Jack meanwhile has a ship with no surgeon on it, and a vacancy, and they like one another, so it seems a simple solution. And so Stephen shall go to sea.

I suppose, really, that’s the genius of this series. The characters are round, complicated creatures, with obvious and consistent surface qualities but also equally consistent, apparently-contradictory, deeper qualities. Even minor characters sometimes possess this level of depth. Even the cartoony-awful little shit Harte (sometime captain, then admiral, the boss whose wife Jack has been fucking but in Jack's defense so is everybody else) has depths. Unpleasant depths, but he's got reasons and motivations and you do really believe in him; this pays off in book 8 in particular.

We meet Jack's first command, the Sophie, the loveliest tiniest little ship ever, staffed by a pack of utter weirdos. TOM PULLINGS makes his first appearance (he is my favorite supporting character throughout the series, so he will be capitalized henceforth) along with his delightful henchman (the other senior midshipman) Mowett who is James in his first and last appearances and most of the others but for some reason becomes William for a while in the middle, most notably in book 8, and has thus passed into the movie as William. Those are our master's mates, or senior midshipmen. In O'Brian's typical fashion we don't get really concrete physical descriptions of them in the normal sense, but instead get really evocative but nonspecific ones. TOM PULLINGS is "a big shy master's mate", elsewhere specified to be sort of gangly, long and thin, young, with a country accent and foremast-jack antecedents (i.e. started out as a regular sailor and was promoted, instead of the more normal approach where a family of means sends a son to sea as a midshipman), who absolutely blossoms under Jack Aubrey's leadership-by-enthusiastic-example, and we will see him through most of the rest of the series continuing on this trajectory with great competence and charming humbleness.

James Mowett gets a great introduction. He's had a few lines prior to this, mostly repetitively described as (and shown to be) cheerful and generally enthusiastic about things, running around and getting to be the one to fetch Stephen from the shore, and later we find out that he is a prolific writer of somewhat-terrible poetry, which we'll get plenty of excerpts of over the course of the series. But his first real description is:

“James Mowett was a tubular young man, getting on for twenty; he was dressed in old sailcoth trousers and a striped Guernsey shirt, a knitted garment that gave him very much the look of a caterpillar."

There are also the youngsters. Meet my beloved son William Babbington, a miniature midshipman of between eleven and thirteen who has every venereal disease and gets drunk a lot. He also cries and swears a whole lot, mostly while sober. I love him immoderately and we will see him in several more of the books. He never gets much taller or less obsessed with womanizing. Adolescence was hard in the Georgian era. (Yes, this is the Georgian era; the Victorian era does not begin for another thirty years.)

“'I suppose you grow used to living here,' [Stephen] observed, rising cautiously to his feet. 'At first it must seem a little confined.' 'Oh, sir,' said Mowett, 'think not meanly of this humble seat, Whence spring the guardians 'of the British fleet! Revere the sacred spot, however low, Which formed to martial acts an Hawke! An Howe !' 'Pay no attention to him, sir,' cried Babbington, anxiously. 'He means no disrespect, I do assure you, sir. It is only his disgusting way.”

Throughout this series, O'Brian so so so vividly shows and describes the many phases of awkwardness that young men go through especially in military settings. It's incredibly vivid; the breaking voices, the smells, the idiotic capers, the weeping, the complete lack of foresight, the incredible cruelty and also loyalty and bravery, the sheer adolescent enthusiasm coupled with shocking laziness.

We also get some insight into contemporary social mores through the introduction of Marshall, the sailing master (a warrant officer)-- 1) he's gay and 2) Jack Aubrey is extremely his type. Different people's different attitudes toward this unspool throughout various points of the book, but the critical point is that Jack Aubrey himself has absolutely zero gaydar and while he has heard the rumor about Marshall's tendencies, he doesn't care about that stuff, studiously avoids enforcing any of the regulations against it, and he absolutely never at any point relates this to himself, and never ever realizes why the man is so driven to excel at his job. Not even when an injury to his head and face gives Jack a horrible haircut and worse appearance, and Marshall is horrified and dispirited about it; Jack never twigs just what's amiss.

To be fair to Jack, many many many of the men aboard also respond to him in a similar, though crucially different, way. This is a common thing in this kind of cooped-up little setting; you have a guy who's in charge and gives you positive feedback and like, immediately you'll die for that guy, which is kind of how the military works because you may in fact have to literally die for that guy and it's easier if you're intrinsically motivated in some way. And Jack is very, very good at this in most cases, at taking the measure of the people under his command and getting them to respond to him.

(We can return to Mowett for an explicit example: “'You may light up the sloop, Mr Mowett, and show her our force: I don't want her to do anything foolish, such as firing a gun - perhaps hurting some of our people. Let me know when you have laid her aboard.' With this [Jack] retired, calling for a light and something hot to drink; and from his cabin he heard Mowett's voice, cracked and squeaking with the excitement of this prodigious command (he would happily have died for Jack), as under his orders the Sophie bore up and spread her wings.”)

Anyway so back to the plot summary: a very good side plot throughout is that the ship's first lieutenant, James Dillon, is an Irishman, and he and Stephen Maturin were both involved in the Irish rebellion in 1798. When they meet, James recognizes Stephen, and cautiously sounds him out about having met before, and Stephen very coolly replies we've never met but you must be thinking of my cousin who looks just like me but uglier, *so* ugly, he has the face of an informer, and everyone hates an informer and james is like Ah. You Are Absolutely Correct Sir We Have Never Met. This subplot develops into a delicious meditation on divided loyalties and the agony of staying true to oneself while doing what one must do. Highly recommended, A++. Begins to give us some insight into the various depths of Stephen, who doesn't understand tides or wind and hasn't the sense to come in out of the rain but has a deep and complicated history and identity and above all an incredible capacity for ruthlessness, absolutely none of which Jack understands.

Stephen and James in dialogue when they're finally in privacy enough to discuss it (Stephen is the first speaker, James the second):

“I speak only for myself, mind - it is my own truth alone - but man as part of a movement or a crowd is indifferent to me. He is inhuman. And I have nothing to do with nations, or nationalism. The only feelings I have -for what they are - are for men as individuals; my loyalties, such as they may be, are to private persons alone.'' "Patriotism will not do?'' "My dear creature, I have done with all debate. But you know as well as I, patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile." ''Yet you stopped Captain Aubrey playing Croppies Lie Down the other day.” "Oh, I am not consistent, of course; particularly in little things. Who is? He did not know the meaning of the tune, you know. He has never been in Ireland at all, and he was in the West Indies at the time of the rising. [...] But as for that song, I acted as I did partly because it is disagreeable to me to listen to it and partly because there were several Irish sailors within hearing, and not one of them an Orangeman; and it would be a pity to have them hate him when nothing in the manner of insult was within his mind's reach.”

uhhhhhhh but meanwhile: Jack Aubrey and the Sophies wreak havoc in the Mediterranean and make a lot of money and enemies, to the point that the local merchants band together to commission a fairly serious ship expressly to fuck them up. They meet this ship unsuspectingly, manage just in time to disguise themselves, and Stephen hails the ship and asks them in bad Spanish if they know anything about treating the plague, could they send a doctor over, could they spare any medicine. This scares them off and they go away. But now the Sophies know what this ship looks like and what armament it has. So the next time they meet it, they fight it, and so the tiny 14-gun Sophie with 82 men and boys aboard manages to capture the 32-gun Cacafuego with 319 men aboard, and it's very gallant and dashing and probably should not have worked, but it does.

And a little later, the Sophie accidentally meets a pair of very powerful French ships and gets taken in return despite doing some really heroic evasive manoevers.

The French are super nice to them, and we meet a French ship captain named Christy-Palliere who becomes a recurring character, who has English cousins and speaks great English and is both charming and nice, saying things like gather ye rose pods while ye may and being generally gallant. Until some even more powerful English ships heave into view, and the tables turn, but even then Christy-Palliere remains gallant and well-behaved.

We end the book with the court-martial. Any officer who loses his ship for any reason has to go before a court of sea captains to ascertain whether he did everything in his power to avoid losing his ship. So all the officers of the Sophie, including the midshipmen, including the surgeon, have to testify about this. (I feel like the other warrant officers should also have had to testify? but they weren't there and i'm not sure why. TOM PULLINGS is also not mentioned in the scene which he absolutely should be present for, so it's possible that they were just omitted for time.)

“They had each received an official notification the day before, and for some reason each had brought it with him, folded or rolled. After a while Babbington and Ricketts took to changing all the words they could into obscenities, secretly in a corner, while Mowett wrote and scratched out on the back of his, counting syllables on his fingers and silently mouthing. Lucock stared straight ahead of him into vacancy.”

Spoiler: the jury decides that there's not really anything more a 14-gun sloop could have done against two French ships of the line, so they exonerate Captain Aubrey for the loss of his sloop, and thus ends the book.

[bomberqueen17]

i bet you thought i forgot it was friday

for the second week in a row

and you'd be right, i fuckin did

well i remembered it was friday but i forgot what i usually do on fridays and really at this point calling it "usually" is being unnecessarily generous

ok i was just explaining to my BFF (MM, for those who remember the Wee Precious Flower Prince Geralt playthru during the Dark Times) about how ADHD people can't form habits? anyway

so i remembered in time to post a chapter of Fit For Thrones on this, technically still a Friday, though i know most of you are now off on your weekend jaunts and won't see it until MOnday, but still, here it is

AND it's a tie-in chapter!!! I'm finally tieing shit back in with the Trust series! Yes!!!

So, chapter 7 of Fit For Thrones, on AO3

and if you want bonus points it's got a bit of Chapter 5 of Involved Process right in it

But to my astonishment even doing the "lazy" thing of rewriting the same scene from a different POV made me realize new shit so it turns out to have been worth it on its own merits and not just for the lulz.

“Has he put his dick in anybody lately?” Lambert asked. “That’s usually his preferred flavor of drama.” It took a great deal of self-discipline not to laugh out loud at that, but Morvran would not presume to be in on the joke yet. His role in these conversations was to be the straight man, to supply the setups so someone else could do the punchline. He kept himself from laughing with some effort, and managed to get out straight-faced, “I do not believe I’d be on the list of people who’d know of such matters.” This wasn’t true at all. He knew a great deal about who Geralt was possibly in flirtation with, but he wasn’t going to divulge any of that. In fact, Geralt’s current location was perhaps relevant to this topic, but would surely be revealed in due time. He wasn’t sure Ciri knew about that yet either. The persona Morvran was playing would absolutely not know of such matters, however, so it wasn’t a lie by that measure. “Ah,” Lambert said, and turned his attention to Ciri. “What about you? I’d meant to follow up on that.” “I have not put my dick in anybody lately,” Ciri said, also keeping a straight face with some effort. “Lambert, please do not tell me any more detail than I already have about the adventures of your dick, of late, either.” “I mean,” Lambert said, prosaic, “I don’t think there’s any mystery there.” Actually Morvran had been mildly wondering; the fellow was linked both with the mage and with the other Witcher, and while there were clearly intimate relationships among all of them, he hadn’t yet puzzled out just who was more closely linked with whom. “Say, Voorhis was it?” “That is my family name, yes,” Morvran said warily. Sometimes this was the downside of playing the setup guy for punchlines; you occasionally wound up as the punchline yourself. Playing it absolutely straight was the only defense. “It is appropriate to use for me.” “Yeah, good,” Lambert said. “Hey, is it a crime in Nilfgaard to put your dick into a man?” Laughing was absolutely not called-for at this juncture. He had to break eye contact and look away to keep his expression under control. “Ah, it is if the man does not want you to put your, ah, dick into him,” he said carefully. He was perfectly fluent in filthy Nordling slang thanks to Tiron’s extensive research but he wasn’t sure how to say it in this put-on accent, so it was best to pretend he didn’t know the words well. “It is a crime to put your, ehm, your dick, into anybody who does not want it put into them.”

[bomberqueen17]

flaming arrows

i have no hilarious writeup of the whole thing but there was one moment, amidst all of the enormous drama of @some-stars playing the Battle of Kaer Morhen on stream last night, that made me laugh so much and I keep repeating the laughter this morning.

So right it’s all dramatic and they’re preparing for this battle and you’ve been emotionally gutpunched by Ciri’s reunions with everyone and now Geralt is walking around making sure everything is ready and

Roche and Ves are there in this playthrough, and as you walk past them you hear the single stupidest fucking exchange of dialogue I’ve ever overheard in a video game, and Dude and I kept repeating it to each other the whole night.

Ves says something like “well what’s so great about flaming arrows”, and Roche, sounding utterly, utterly serious in that square-jawed way only he can, says “well the point is that they are aflame”, and it’s presented as if this were a perfectly reasonable and serious conversation for them to be having.

Dude keeps saying “well what’s so great about flaming arrows” to me and I love this.

(Like, obviously it’s just meant to be atmospheric, and it’s just meant to sound like they’re having a serious conversation in the background, but oh my god it’s hilarious.)

[bomberqueen17]

Geralt of Rivia, we consign thee to thy rest, stung to death by a bunch of fucking bees whilst thou stoodst there wondering what that noise was

Here Be Ye Final Resting Place Of Ye Wee Precious Flower Prince Geralt, Who Died Of Not Knowing How To Parry, Punched To Death By A Drunk

Daringly Killed Ye Wyverne Then Fell Off Ye Towere Trying To Loot It

“O friends, we gather together to consign to his final rest Geralt of Rivia, a beloved companion, defender of the weak, and big old slut for literally anyone who offered, who after defeating many foes and fighting many, many battles, wandered into a dim cave, failed to notice the signs of subterranean gas, and lit a torch, which blasted him to Kingdom Come.”

“Rest in peace, Geralt ‘Fall Damage’ of Rivia.”

“Alas, we gather together to mourn the passing of Geralt, who somehow did not notice that there were seven guards watching him from a distance of less than ten feet as he stood at the edge of a cliff and looted a barrel full of things that belonged to those guards. We can’t blame them for killing him, but we are sorry he’s dead.”

I love this game.

god i love dying in the witcher 3. not because i have to do part of what i was doing again but because i love to just. imagine the funeral.

like i always picture them burning geralts body at kaer morhen and giving him a eulogy n shit n i always imagine they'd just lowkey roast geralt the entire time. like.

"here lies geralt of rivia (or geralt eric roger du haute-bellegarde), the butcher of blaviken, the white wolf. who walked the path for 138 slutty, slutty years, during which he was part of many important political plots and wars and fought bravely and valiantly. geralt of rivia, who fucking died because he was fighting three (3) drowners and couldn't eat his raw onions fast enough. he was not very smart."

or "here lies geralt of rivia, who died because he jumped off of a 6-foot ledge as a shortcut and didn't know that that would fucking kill him. we don't know how he managed to die from that, either."

or "here lies geralt of rivia, who, after fighting off 15 men and sustaining minimal damage, set a barrel on fire for funsies, didn't step back far enough, and fucking blew himself up. may he rest in pieces. godspeed you absolute idiot."

[bomberqueen17]

Geralt “Fall Damage” of Rivia

So this isn’t a proper Wee Precious Flower Prince writeup because I just can’t muster the concentration for those anymore but we did do some Witchering at MM and DF’s house this weekend-- it started off with me asking DF how many units of fisstech he had in his stash, since he’d decided he was going to always collect it and never drop or sell it, and there’s nothing else you can do with it so he just keeps it in his stash. So DF booted up the Xbox just to go check his stash, but then once he had booted it up he realized Geralt was all dressed up for a party, and he wanted to go to the party, so--

anyway. My dude was mildly inwardly distressed to realize that he absolutely knew where the stash location is in Novigrad, because he often watches @some-stars stream with me. “And Dandelion is just standing there like a weirdo always in exactly the same place....”

Twenty-two units of fisstech, is what DF has in his stash, by the way.

Anyway DF killed Geralt several times by piloting him off cliffs, off embankments, off smallish rises. “Is there a potion that reduces fall damage?” he asked, and MM, innocently, Googled that, and was like “oh boy” and he was like “what” and she was like “well a lot of people on the Internet are frustrated with how easily Geralt takes fall damage”

to put it mildly

“Oh come on,” DF said, as Geralt died tripping down an embankment, “a standard human could have survived that! Like, I mean, he’d’ve been paying me a visit, after, but--”

“I guess you would have some insight into standard human injuries,” I said, in an understatement. (It’s a while since DF worked an ER rotation, but he used to do them very regularly up until like, maybe a couple of years ago? He only sees the cases that require surgery, as he’s an anaesthesiologist, but that does give you a good idea of what sort of severe injuries one frequently sees.)

“I’ll tell you what I know,” he said, as the game loaded up, “never ever go onto your roof.”

Good life lesson.

As a hilarious capper to this, towards the end of the evening, DF piloted Geralt into a courtyard and then realized he couldn’t hop the other wall to use it as a shortcut. He’d jumped up onto a bench, but then realized he couldn’t make the jump the rest of the way over the wall, so he turned around and hopped down off the bench.

And took fall damage. It wasn’t a lot, but it was a little sliver off the end of his health bar.

“What the shit was that,” DF said, as I howled in laughter.

[bomberqueen17]

wee precious flower prince: muffin top buttocks

so this is only a partial session but it’s taking me forever to write up, lol. so here it is.

12/26; I’m in kind of a dark place personally and we’re all tired and burnt-out, so much drink is taken and we can’t remember how the buttons work.

I had to look up the last time we played. Apparently around July 4th sometime, but the last time we were in regular rotation it was, like, May, so. It’s been a bit. (For a quick recap, this is the Wee Precious Flower Prince tag where my previous write-ups are, and if you don’t feel like finding out the hard way, the tl;dr version is that at the beginning of the quarantine lockdown when I got laid off I went to isolate with my BFF from high school, heretofore known as Math Mom or MM for short (a math teacher and a mom, that’s a complicated backstory), and one of my college roommates, to whom I introduced her, and who she’s now been with since like 2000 or 2001 thru his whole medical school experience and now numerous years as a doctor, who for simplicity’s sake I call Doctor Friend. He incidentally minored in video gaming, and as a result is real good at Xbox. He often plays it in the evenings to unwind; he has been working rather unsurprisingly hard through all of (*gestures broadly*) this. MM and I bullied him into downloading Witcher 3 early in the quarantine lockdown because we’d watched the Netflix miniseries and it would be more interesting than the shoot-em-up multiplayer he plays most of the time. (Warframe, if you’re into that shit.))

The kids have been intermittently in school but never more than two days a week and often less. But anyway, the part that’s germane to this writeup is that, perhaps not surprisingly, the children have since our last session destroyed the gaming chair in the living room, and so as I lay our fair scene, understand that our brave game controller operator, DF, is operating under the handicap of not having a chair to sit in.

So the first thing that happened is that he sat on— ok I should back up. They have a trampoline in their living room. It’s a small trampoline, about three, three and a half feet across. (My feeble American brain helpfully suggests to me that that’s about a meter if you split the difference.) It was given to them by DF’s fitness nut father. Not for the children, but because this is a great form of low-impact exercise for adults; you don’t bounce on it, you use it to run in place. I don’t know; he’s very Manhattan, which incorporates a certain amount of trendiness and folds in a healthy dose of being super neurotic about unexpected things, as far as I can tell. SO anyway. They have a trampoline in their living room, upon which their son bounces for probably six to eight hours a day. He got a Switch for Christmas, and so plays Yoshi’s Crafted World while jumping on a trampoline for hours. This child is about to turn eight and could likely run a marathon; he proudly pulled up his shirt at his dad’s request and showed off his sculpted, ripped abdominal muscles, which are sort of hilarious on a child his size. (He’s still just barely at the age where his head’s a bit too big for his body, but his body is r i p p e d so it’s adorable and hilarious. LISTEN we all have to keep ourselves going somehow in the pandemic and this is way less distracting than his sister’s method, which has been to develop a massive anxiety disorder. KIDDING. wellll sort of. Anyway that could be going worse but it could be going better, but this is all a digression.)

So there’s a trampoline in the TV room. DF booted up the xbox, sat on the trampoline, and while the screen loaded proceeded to go on a 20-minute rant about Cyberpunk 2077. He hasn’t gotten a lot of people time lately, so.

Long story short he was disappointed about CP2077. Join the club.

Finally we got Witcher loaded up. It’s raining and we’re in a… Novigrad maybe? and we don’t recognize Geralt’s outfit and because of the rain shine effect and the way the tails of his shirt hang it looks like he’s wearing 1) really tight thigh-highs that are 2) causing his buttocks to kind of squeeze out the tops in a muffin-top effect and 3) said buttocks look as though they are encased in silver metallic booty shorts. We paused to look at what the fuck he was wearing, panning all around, and determined that no it’s like, a short tunic over like, hosen-style trousers, and his braies are hanging out, and what looks like muffin-top buttocks is really the short tail of his tunic kind of blousing out under the tight belt that holds the Guy Fieri orange and black gambeson we forgot we’d put him in. Suddenly there was screaming, and we realized that apparently by standing there in the middle of the bridge in the rain looking at Geralt we were causing the guards to panic, so we had to leave suddenly.

“Now,” DF said meditatively, as Geralt walked along a rainy sidewalk, “I have to remember what all the buttons do.” He called up the map, decided on a particular quest, and figured we’d walk along the way and look at all the big question marks on the map. Somewhere in there, we’d remember what the buttons do. We passed a beggar pissing off the edge of a bridge in the dark, which was kind of more local color than we’d strictly expected to see, and next to him a woman was randomly pitching pails of water off into the darkness. Self-refilling water pails, which was even more surprising. 

Contract: Mysterious Tracks. Well, we gotta walk there, so. “Where’s Yennefer?” MM asks. “She smelled great at that funeral.” “Before I smell the ladies, I’ve got to remember how the buttons work,” says DF. “Press X to smell ladies,” Dude suggests. (He knows nothing of video games and has only sat in on these sessions a couple of times, so he has no idea what we’re talking about but is all-in on the color commentary.)

We encountered some bees and remembered that we have a terrible vendetta against bees in this game. “They need to die!” MM said. There ensued an awkward few moments as DF realized he had no idea how to access any of the Witcher powers. He had to scroll around and find the diagram, but fortunately he had enough presence of mind to retreat beyond where the bees were stinging him. He managed to Igni the hive but then it wouldn’t let him pick up the honeycomb, and in the attempt, he got caught in a little copse of three trees and rattled around until we were all dying of laughter. Finally he managed to get out, and we resumed the journey, realized we were heading the entirely wrong direction, and then were beset by wolves, which was worrying until he realized they were only level 5. Yes, this is still Death March mode, but Geralt’s level 17; it didn’t take much to kill a pack of wolves, surely.

Er, well. Okay, it kind of did. “I don’t…” DF said slowly, pushing buttons, “remember how to… heal? Uhhh I probably need to figure that out.” Then after a few moments of waving around his weirdly-glowing sword (we’d forgotten he had this bizarre sort of scythe-thing of a fantasy blade now) he said “Uhhh how do I put my thingy away?”

“In some games, you can’t,” said my-Dude, referring to the Cyberpunk 2077 glitch where the character’s dick clips through their trousers unfixably. DF finally got the sword sheathed, after a bit more fiddling, and then was set upon by deserters.

“Your ass is mine!” one of the deserters yelled, and MM was like “Oh! Well if you know how to press the buttons, you can have it!”

“I mean,” said DF, accidentally sheathing his sword and then punching several deserters with his fists instead, “tempting.”

He did manage to kill the deserters, whereupon there were immediately guards we were cautioned not to behave aggressively around lest we upset them. “Where the fuck were they for the deserters,” DF grumbled.

Geralt walked through a campfire and got set on fire and then just sort of wandered around like that for a bit, which led MM to quip that his muffin-top-ass was smoking hot.

DF was still intensely trying to remind himself of how the buttons worked, so there followed an interlude where, sword drawn, Geralt locomoted himself down the street by a combination of repeated hopping, rolling, and flailing. Nobody called the cops, and we didn’t kill any bystanders. It’s not like DF doesn’t use the Xbox all the dang time, but he hadn’t so much as looked at Witcher since (I looked it up) a solitary excursion in July, after not having touched it since May. So… bit of a re-learning curve here.

“Sweet,” DF said, “ghouls,” and went to town fighting them. Of course one dropped the predictable loot, which is the only thing Dude remembered from last time we watched this game being played— he made up a song about Monster Bone and gleefully redeployed it here.

“Oh yeah,” DF said, finishing up  the fight and destroying the monster nest. “There was a whole sequence of things I used to do. Like. Oiling myself up. I need to get back into that.” Meditatively, he paged through the options. “Potions and food and shit. Yeah.”

He’d picked up a new quest called Tough Luck but then couldn’t find it in the quest list. Shrugging, he went on with the game, and then suddenly it made the “AAHH” noise and was like “Quest completed: Tough Luck” so apparently that quest consists of just whatever you were gonna do anyway. Good to know? “That’s level thirteen,” DF muttered to himself, as a new enemy charged onto the scene. “All right, I need to actually figure out how to fight now.” And then he promptly put the game on pause and took an intermission to go mix another drink.

Quite a lot of drink had been taken all around, by all of us, at this point. We’d had a cheese plate before and during and after dinner, with many exotic cheeses (MM’s brother had sent it for the holidays), and yet DF reappeared eating a string cheese, which set my Dude to Judging him, and sparked a heated debate over the validity of string cheese as a foodstuff. “There’s a time and a place for different cheeses,” DF said defensively, “and now is the time for string cheese.” “It’s not even really cheese!” Dude protested, which sparked a lengthy search for the container so the nutrition information and ingredients could be read. I absented myself from the discussion, instead seeking out yet more evil things to put into eggnog.

Immediately after intermission, we returned to strategize how to defeat an actual enemy with actual stats. DF oiled himself moderately and just hit the thing a bunch and killed it, but. “Oh EATING,” he said suddenly, “that’s the other thing that restores health,” and ran down the road alternately drawing and sheathing each of his two swords.

We hit An Unfortunate Turn Of Events, which is yet another of the many, many, many bits in Witcher 3 where some poor hapless peasant who in keeping with the world building should probably be illiterate still sits down with pen and expensive parchment to write out some incredibly dramatic-ironic words that by rights he really should not be taking the time in an emergency to right. Every time, I recite the bit from Monty Python’s Holy Grail where they’re reading a note scrawled into the rock face and it says “Castle Aaargh” and they theorize that perhaps the teller died while carving it. Anyway this Castle Aargh note was about refugees finding a safe place to flee too, next to a bunch of refugees who had not arrived safely and were now dead beyond helping. Nothing to be done but to loot their corpses, of course. Then we killed whatever monsters had done them in, of course, and then the screen froze up for a cutscene. “Ohh,” DF said, “this is when everyone walks back all burly.” Meaning, of course, the animation that plays when you clear an area so it’s safe for its inhabitants to come back— and the inhabitants are invariably these large, capable-looking muscular dudes and you’re like why could you not do anything about this situation?? They always look sort of threatening. But sure enough, a bunch of meathead-looking dudes swaggered onto the screen, and when the cutscene ended, Geralt was surrounded by small children skipping ropes directly over the dismembered corpses of whatever thing he’d just killed, while he’s still in the process of looting. Distantly, one of the sprites coughed, and DF yelled “HE’S GOT THE ‘RONA”, proving that we do still live in the current era.

Onscreen, the scenery unfurled into a particularly dramatic sunset, and MM sighed. “I’m feeling the spice nog,” she admitted, sipping some of her extremely-boozy eggnog to which she’d added spiced jaegermeister. DF turned around and said, mock-mournfully, “You used to feel MY spice nog.” (Hm their 20th wedding anniversary is coming up.)

We went into a village to find out about a contract, and as we stood talking to a man, a random woman walked up and just RAMMED into Geralt’s back, knocking him staggering forward. The woman made one of the weirdly-sexy “oof!” sort of noises people make in these games. “YOU ran into ME,” DF said, somewhat aggrieved. Anyway we got our info and ran off into the woods. “Big,” Geralt said, of the tracks. “Really big.” I love how he monologues to himself all the goddamned time. We picked up a trail and had to follow a scent. Bear? we guessed. “Fiend?” A cave popped up on the minimap, so we started doing laps of it, more or less, trying to figure out what the fuck we were looking for. We kept being offered crow’s eye, and told to Examine poop, so we picked flowers and looked at shit.

Abruptly we found the cave entrance, by falling into it. “I bonked!” MM said, mimicking what her children still say when they fall, and immediately followed it up with her own line. “Do you need a band-aid, Geralt?” He did not, and only took slight fall damage, fortunately. Immediately we found the fiend, who was dead.

Right about now DF began to complain that the trampoline upon which he was sitting was not super ergonomic. We paused to refill our drinks, and thence continued our examination of the cave, since it seemed important to know what had killed the fiend. “Can you summon your horse inside the cave?” MM asked. DF pushed a button. Geralt made a “poof” noise and emitted a green gas. [ok i think he took a potion, is what happened, but this is what it looked like to us.] “Not that button,” DF said. “Excuse you,” MM said, affronted. “Sorry,” DF said, in old reflex.

Since we are old, when we discovered that the fiend killer was a chort, we all said more or less in unison “The King’s gone mad with power! He’s gonna eat the Chort!” (oh my god kids these days don’t know about that site. we all feel old thinking of it.)

Turns out we need to make a chort lure, but I believe I’ve mentioned before here that DF operates under a terrible handicap where he’s from downstate, so in his dialect the word “lure” is pronounced identically to the word “lore” so he’s going on and on about Chort Lore. Coincidentally we need fiend dung and crow’s eye, which were both outside. Kind of a gimme, but like, whatever man, we’ll take it. So we made what DF, possibly tired of us mocking his <strike>speech impediment</strike> accent, dubbed Chort Lube. “He needs a good swording,” DF reflected, as he set up his items. “Put the lore in your slot!” I told him. “Lube,” he corrected. “Lube in my slot.” By this point of the evening, rather a lot of drink had been taken, so at that moment he accidentally de-equipped all the garments on Geralt’s upper body, and then exited the equipment panel. Geralt stood half-naked upon the moonlit hillside, looking dramatic and perhaps a bit chilly. “Fuck,” DF said, belatedly noticing what he’d done, “where did my shirt go?”

After some struggle he got Geralt’s shirt back on but then we really struggled attempting to deploy the chort lube. “You cannot do that now,” the game said at one point. Then DF Igni’d the hillside, then he jumped a few times. “You cannot do that now,” it said again. “No…. no…. not here… what the fuck.” Igni again. It was a regular lil comedy of errors. It had little gold circles we were supposed to be in, but DF hadn’t played long enough to get un-rusty before he’d drunk enough gin to be impaired, so. Eventually, we got the hillside lubed. Then we had to lube the sword. I was quite impaired by this point as well but somehow still instantly knew that relict oil was what was necessary. (Why is this what my brain has now?) We went back into the cave, and found some Devil’s Puffball, as you do. “I feel like I should use that on my face before I go out,” MM observed. “No,” I said, “i feel like that’s more of a decollté situation?”

At some point, MM noticed that in the intervening time since DF last got Geralt a haircut, DF had grown his own facial hair out accidentally to match. Chops, mustache, soul patch— some of that is to leave the areas where a surgical mask needs a good fit on the face bare, in DF’s case, but it did mean it looks like DF got Geralt’s hair did to match him.

while we were distracted by this, we fell into the cave again, which was good because we had forgotten where it was. The chort came in, ready to fight, and DF said, nonchalantly, “At a time like this, I like to have a lil snack,” and equipped himself a ham sandwich.  “Wonder what sign is gonna be useful for this,” he went on, still unconcernedly paging through his setup. “Well, a lil quen never hurt.” After a bit, DF observed, “Hm, sword’s not doing a ton of damage.” For once, for a wonder, he was pretty good about renewing Quen as it broke. “Eeehhhhhh ah here we go!” At last, the chort went toes-up, and we looted the corpse and then fiddled around endlessly in the inventory screen, as one does. “He needs bits for his stuff,” DF said. “No,” MM corrected, “he needs stuff for his bits.”

The quest gave a healthy 320 xp, which was nice. We noted that we still don’t have superior beast oil, which was like, the only thing MM wanted out of this whole game. Upon inspection, we realized that we don’t even have Enhanced beast oil yet, which is a bummer. So we need to get bison grass and bear fat, which sounds like a hell of a party if you ask me. And like. A cockatrice stomach, which. Not a party, there.

Quest complete, we fast traveled to Ursten and hit up a few question marks enroute to the White Lady quest, up next. We passed a really lovely sunrise, and paused to admire it.

DF got up and un-velcroed his pants loudly. “Uhh,” I said, not sure where this was going. “Is there superior beast oil?” MM asked excitedly, still mentally stuck on the prior conversation. “Come find out,” DF said, and staggered off to the bathroom. (She did not.)

When he came back, I commented that I hadn’t expected his pants, which looked like, IDK, regular dude pants, to be Velcro at the waist, so he came over to show me the fastening and accidentally still had his fly down so I fell backward off the couch and there was a great deal of hilarity over the fact that he’d just Cyberpunk’d me.

Next up we paused to look at a scenic lil island full of nekkers, that was also sort of surprisingly on fire? Abruptly DF discovered the trampoline was too annoying to lie on any further, so he relocated to the couch where his wife was, and instead of sitting next to her, sat on her, after the manner of a very large dog not quite aware he is too large to be a lapdog. Unfazed, as this has been a regular occurrence over the two decades of their pair bond, MM moved her drink to her other hand to rescue it from being spilled. She said, of Geralt’s onscreen look, “I am still having trouble visually parsing your muffin top buttocks,” only through the filter of her considerable consumption of Jaegermeister, it came out “I’m having trouble with your muffin buckets,” which if any of us are sober enough to remember this will likely pass into household lore. DF realized he can’t read the text onscreen from his comfortable seat atop his wife’s entire person, and asked if she could make out the text. After some squinting, she managed, but said, “I need my opera glasses if we’re to continue this configuration.”

Meanwhile, Geralt had gone and stood in a hot cadaver fire. Shortly thereafter, he discovered a beehive. “AHH IT’S BEES,” he said, running wildly around. “Surely he can squiggle them with his fingermagic,” MM said. “Ah yes,” DF said, “my fingermagic is well known across the land.”

The quest name was “The Things Men Do For Coin” but it popped up with something obscuring part of it, so all we could read was “The Things Men Do For C” and MM briefly lost her mind about what C stood for. I’ll leave that to the imagination. (I was texting with a friend and in an adorably ace manner they were like ‘i was thinking about sailors needing vitamin C…’ ah, no, that was not the general, uh, thrust of the conversation in the room.)

Break for inventory management. Geralt tried on some baggy trousers and smacked his thighs, which in the bulky pants did a strange firm sort of jiggle. We all laughed quite a lot at that.

I should have switched to water, but at this point apparently filled my cup with vodka. Listen it is a cold dark fucking winter and I’m gona do what I’m gonna do. Endregas showed up but none of us could read the screen at all, so much squinting ensued. “The endrega queen just got you with her Thagomizer.” “Endreg queen? Performs in dreg?” “That needs more workshopping.”

Post-fight, Geralt performed an entertaining series of calisthenics while DF tried in vain to find the “summon Roach” button. Hop, skip, run, punch, hop, hop, draw sword, put sword away, throw bomb. Whoops! Nope. Nope? Nope. I finally Googled it and told him how, so he summoned Roach like nothing had happened and went on our way.

[bomberqueen17]

kneeling

this isn’t really a Wee Precious Flower Prince playthrough post or anything, it’s just a single observation, but I was watching @some-stars stream Witcher 3 on Twitch last night and Geralt, as he does, happened upon a Place of Power, as he does.

And of course, as he does, he went up to it and knelt at it, and I was like

that is the most Catholic thing I have ever seen

so I pointed out in the Twitch that it stood to reason that a bunch of game devs in an extremely Catholic nation would in fact prioritize their character having a flawless kneeling mechanism.

I’d sort of half-noticed it before in other playthroughs but just then given the context I was like ah holy shit, because I expected Geralt to cross himself and was inwardly startled when he didn’t.

I bet Geralt has a good genuflect movement coded in, too...

i still haven’t worked up my good thesis about how Catholic Geralt is as opposed to how Jewish @2nico has theorized Lambert to be but there’s a preview of it.

Also now I have Tom Lehrer’s Vatican Rag stuck in my head.

genuflect! genuflect! genuflect!

this sort of thing is just kind of an occupational hazard of being me, though.

[bomberqueen17]

when this dialogue option came up I squealed "DO IT PLAY HIDE AND SEEK WITH THE KIDS" and DF was like... really... and I was like C'mon you're playing this in-character, Geralt would TOTALLY play hide-and-seek with kids, and DF sighed and was like, you're right.

All right, but you gotta do somethin’ for us, too. Play hide-n-seek. Gran never does, says her feet hurt.

[bomberqueen17]

What I Learned From The Witcher 3

So here’s the succinct walkthrough joke I was working on but couldn’t get out this morning:

The bandits at the Inn at the Crossroads give Geralt a scornful/lascivious (which, really?) once-over, and comment on how he must be a big deal because he’s got two swords. The other bandit says, then does he have two pricks??

Geralt answers them that the silver one’s for monsters and the steel one’s for humans. He then concludes by confirming that he’s only got the one prick, though.

Shortly thereafter, we had a short chapter to play through as Ciri, who only carries one sword. In this, she has to kill a werewolf. She only carries one sword, and it’s a steel sword. But, she explains to the small child she rescues, if she gets the right components, she can make a blade oil that’ll let her steel sword be effective on a monster.

So the moral of the story is, you only need one prick, if you have the right lubricants. 

[bomberqueen17]

a big reply-reply dump

gwogobo replied to your post “he actually equipped Quen on this one”

I probably shouldn't find this playthrough as enthralling as I do, but I do so /shrug

I am trying to keep it interesting. It’s the only interesting thing happening in my life and for a while there it was the only writing I could do, so I sure hope it’s entertaining, LOL.

(That’s my advice to other writers, too-- if you’re having terrible writer’s block, writing anything is better than nothing, and nonfiction and essays are, at least for me, a really great way of getting those gears turning because it’s easy enough to start trying to think of a way to structure and embellish a nonfiction story that happened to you, and from there at least for me it doesn’t take long for my desire to tell a whole new story to build up until I can’t actually stop myself from writing, so-- it works, generally.)

more joy behind the cut, including a bonus AO3 comment:

childoffantasy replied to your post “he actually equipped Quen on this one”

OKAY ACTUALLY I MIGHT HAVE AN EXPLANATION ABOUT CUNNY OF THE GOOSE. There is some historical precedent for goose being slang for one's prostitute, so every time I hear about this Cunny of the Goose place I wanna know if they have a particularly good brothel that might have given their town its name

OK that’s hilarious. Listen, maybe there was a brothel there, we didn’t actually look!

akilah12902 replied to your post “he actually equipped Quen on this one”

Re: the dead son: huh. I tell her about it; the letter you find on him actually has a lot more detail about how he realized what a lot of the Nilfgaardian war machine was doing was wrong, and like... maybe changing hearts and minds.

I didn’t find that the letter really had that much good content in it, it was mostly him being full of despair. If I were the mom I’d’ve wanted to read it, but I understood Geralt not handing it over and telling her a pretty lie instead. Because let’s be real here, a sad mom is going to change the mind of the White Flame Dancing On The Barrows Of His Foes? 

I don’t think so. This ain’t a democracy.

(Also, the Hearts And Minds phrase comes from a really fucking horrible Vietnam campaign that Really Really Did Not Work, so, sorry if I had an involuntary cringe response to that thought. Ooh it’s got a dark history in general, as a phrase. [link is to wikipedia])

kaijyuu replied to your post “no mercy once she grips a sword”

deffo what akilah said. also, coral was just... sort of a huge asshole, but doesn't iirc use artefact compression on anyone? it was used on yennefer by another sorceress tho, and is quite unpleasant. also dandelion's voice is-- something. i feel like netflix!jaskier is a huge glow up for the character in general, really.

IDK about Coral at all, but you are absolutely, absolutely right that Netflix!Jaskier is an enormous fucking glow-up, I know this and haven’t even really properly met Dandelion.

bygodstillam reblogged your post and added:

/chinhands at this entire thing

Hee, hi! I’ve made some great progress on the Morning After bit too, I’m rather pleased. 

gnomeicecream replied to your post “geralt says fuck cops”

A lot of fic I've read show Dandylion with a sister? Maybe its only fanon

It’s definitely fanon. I mean, I gave him a sister too, but-- in this game plot it is extremely clear that he is lying to every one of the women he speaks to and is claiming that the woman he’s most infatuated with is his sister, to keep the others from being jealous, and it’s presented as being on the face of it rather flimsy, as a story.

Yeah, Netflix!Jaskier is in every single fucking way a huge improvement.

saffronheliotrope replied to your post “geralt says fuck cops”

I’m delighted to hear that Morvran is obsessed with horses in the game, because pretty much the only detail I remember about him from astolat’s fics is that at one point Ciri says he’s a magnificent horseman who fucks as well as he rides. A+ for consistent characterization!

!!!!

Go Ciri! I hope she’s getting what she wants out of it. (Maybe I remember that bit. I should reread those now that i know who most of those people are.)

nogling replied to your post “geralt says fuck cops”

I will say that if you DO ask why Elihal is dressed like that, you get some great lines about personal expression, and Geralt is pretty chill about it.

Oh, that’s good to know. We weren’t willing to risk it. DF was so funny, he was just like, I am absolutely fucking not choosing that dialogue option, it’s none of Geralt’s fucking business why he’s dressed like that.

bittylildragon replied to your post “geralt says fuck cops”

There's a few nice Elihal/Eibhear fics, if that's of interest to you

Oh is Eibhear the one with the dumplings? Ohoho I should probably seek those out. I haven’t done the swords and dumplings quest though we did accidentally do the opening cutscene bit, I’ve probably met him enough to go on with.

bittylildragon replied to your post “geralt says fuck cops”

The game's treatment of Elihal is Extremely Questionable, but they did really weirdly manage to give Elihal some good lines? It's confusing and upsetting at the same time. Thankfully a very small subset of game fans really like Elihal and ship them with Eibhear, the elven blacksmith in the same city.

I mean-- that’s the thing! He’s so undeniably a rad character!! Like, why’d you have to make it weird, CDPR??? 

OK I definitely will have to look those up. 

Be hilarious if later Geralt’s like back in Kaer Morhen and he’s like “oh so this is wild, I met this elf in Novigrod who wore these pretty dresses--” and Lambert’s like “yes he was so cool” and Geralt’s like “... oh you know him” and shuts his mouth but I won’t write that because it would require acknowledging their weird awkward characterization of Geralt as somehow being 100 years old and never having met anyone cross-dressing before.)

bittylildragon replied to your post “geralt says fuck cops”

IMO Zoltan is not only a dadfriend (he's probably forever trying to feed Dandelion and Geralt) he is also clearly Geralt's FWB.

ORLY? Hm, I can see that. Surely someone has ficced this. I mostly consume fic through recs but I see between this and the elf dress-person I am going to have to do some searching. 

 enchanting-person-wizardreplied to your post“UNDERCUT ACHIEVED”

Dude oil has me in hysterics every freaking single time and I live for these play through writeups - I look forward to them all the time lol I’m playing, too, atm, so it’s cool to be like yeah, I know what you’re talking about rn, and that’s so fun! Plus, absolutely the undercut is like 10/10 the best option- like, especially paired with the full beard?? Lol

ugh I WISH we had the full beard. But the soul patch is, at least, ignorable; I can just make it a goatee in my mind, because the rest of his chin is sort of stubbley, so it’s kinda acceptable. 

Dude Oil. I should’ve worked harder on incorporating a mention of Dude Oil into the sex scene I wrote but I figured I should keep it lowkey-- Geralt’s Box O Where Weird Salves Go To Die is as close as I’d let myself come. Maybe the saddest bit of that is that I know he’s not using those to wank with, he’s mostly using them as chapstick/moisturizer/hair oil because his skin gets so dry in Kaer Morhen’s winters and if he greases himself up before he goes to bed he winds up less ashy and frizzy and it’s all soaked in so he’s not trying to live his life with a fine coating of grease on his face all the time. But sometimes whatever odd ingredients are in it give his hair a weird color cast or make him smell funny and he just deals with it because he doesn’t take bad care of himself, but he also doesn’t take real great care of himself. He’s going to not be ashy (not that an albino can really be ashy, per se-- he is, more or less, an albino, after all, but you know. as a very pale person I totally can get ashy) but he’s also not going to pamper himself with, like, cocoa butter and rose hip seed oil or anything. (Rose hip seed oil is supposed to help with scarring, which, he’s definitely not bothering with that.)

which brings me to OH the BEST AO3 COMMENT of the recent lot (and there have been a lot of good ones):

transcript: Mikiwatches left the following comment on The Ancient Sea:

I am sorry, but Geralt is a dangerous bottle reuser and needs to go to jail for 1000 years. Geralt buys bulk spices and puts them in mayonnaise jars unlabeled. Geralt decants hand soap into shampoo bottles as body wash. When will he pay for his crimes??

THIS IS SO TRUE

He doesn’t even buy the bulk spices, he makes them himself. And he’s just like my sister, who is this times a thousand including the growing the herbs herself-- she doesn’t peel the labels off the jars so they’re still like, Chunky Salsa or whatever, and then she scrawls the new thing in Sharpie on the lid but then neither crosses it off nor removes it with rubbing alcohol when she puts something else in there so you’re left standing in her GIANT kitchen (which TEN PEOPLE use on the reg, that’s the farm sister with the crew who take turns cooking) holding a jar that’s printed with Chunky Salsa and the lid has a Sharpie scrawl that says LARD and it’s filled with some greenish dried vegetable matter that smells like perhaps borage or it could be marjoram and who the fuck knows, maybe it’s poisonous! 

(My favorite were the unlabeled jars that held the baking powder and the baking soda. TAKE YOUR CHANCES, BABY. Also the sugar and the salt. GOOD FUCKIN LUCK.)

So he’s got like, twelve unlabeled jars next to the bed, all of which contain salves or oils that are mostly based on the same combo of oils and fats so they’re semi-solid at room temp but melt on the skin, and all of them are varying shades of beigeish-green or beigeish brown. And some of them are completely harmless, even beneficial to humans, and some of them will MELT YOUR FUCKING SKIN OFF, MORTAL. Best of luck!

(This is why Lambert teaches Ciri immediately how to mix her own goddamned cosmetics, because he knows very, very well that Geralt is a fucking menace.)

[bomberqueen17]

Witcher 3: Monster Bone

So for the 4th of July my Dude and I stopped off at DF&MM’s in Rochester; I continued on toward the farm for more agricultural laboring, and Dude went back to Buffalo to continue his self-isolation working from home, but we had a small precious respite of socialization. 

We sat outside on the patio and had a little fire and made smores and the kids ran around and were goofy. In the midst of this, DF went to fix some bit of playground equipment, and came back to where the adults were sitting and declared “I put it in a new hole," standing with his hand propped triumphantly on this ridiculous axe/sledgehammer combo he owns. 

He’s prone to declarations like that and long ago we decided it was best to never enquire as to the context. 

As dusk drew down, the kids vanished indoors to be put to bed, and we adults decided not to sit out and get mosquito-eaten, but rather to come inside and close all the windows and doors and blinds. We contemplated watching a movie, but DF was on transplant call and had done two consecutive days with 14-hour shifts (and had suddenly discovered that despite being firmly within the liver transplant team, he could be drafted in emergencies by the kidney transplant team, so that was a somewhat unpleasant surprise; fortunately, his portion of the job is largely unchanged.)

Anyway, he was loopy enough that he thought Xboxing would be fun, so we all got drinks and settled in and he fired up Witcher 3 again.

“We only play Xbox nude and drunk now,” DF said. “New household rules.”

“Oh, okay,” my dude said, and stood up to unfasten his pants. Unfortunately, both of them were bluffing, but that would’ve made this playthrough write up MUCH more entertaining. So, if you prefer, I give you permission to simply imagine that everyone in the room is drunk and naked, as I recount the events onscreen. (What it says about me that I’d still be taking notes is, well, let’s just not consider that too deeply.) (I do think we’d had about a bottle of wine apiece, except that DF had stopped at one glass in case he got called in, so we’d had four bottles between, mostly, three people, and then MM moved on to just drinking a glass of straight vodka that I had assumed was water until I got a whiff. Well, listen, you only live once.)

We loaded the game and were in Novigrad... underwater, breath half used up. “What the fuck,” said DF, “why am I underwater?”

“Well, I mean, in a second you’re going to die of it,” I pointed out, and he swore and had Geralt pop up to the surface. The water was only like nine feet deep. 

“What the fuck,” he said, and got out of the water, and Geralt, unperturbed, proceeded to run around near the wharf in Novigrad. 

We happened upon a strumpet, who with a sultry sort of fretfulness, gave Geralt a quest to save Crippled Kate’s from a bunch of hooligans who had taken it over to drink all the booze in it. 

The hooligans were triflingly easy to defeat with a single application of Axii, which Geralt only bothered to apply to one of them; the rest of them obediently packed up and filed out after their slightly dizzy leader, without questioning his sudden transition to obsequious compliance. The delighted strumpets came back in to reclaim their home.

“This girl’s wearing the Pennsic Uniform,” DF said. (A crop top and broomstick skirt.)

“Oh, yes,” MM said, “I own at least three of that outfit,” which gives rise to the question, why don’t we ever dress up for these gaming sessions? Drunk and naked is one thing but Pennsic Finery would be hilarious. I guess the omnipresent jingle belts would be awkward when dealing with children violating bedtime curfews... The costumes for this whole thing are very Pennsic, as is the combat, but there’s officially No Death Allowed at Pennsic so that’s one very important difference, there.

Geralt didn’t let the strumpets pay him for his work, figuring they’d suffered enough loss of income. Meanwhile DF went to the inventory screen and browsed the list of quests he’d been meaning to get to, and decided it was time to go to the Temerian Peasant Hideout to find out what the deal was with the girl with the shirt open to her navel. Like, she’s not a strumpet, she’s not a mage, why doesn’t she wear a shirt?? We must know. 

Weirdly, even though we just finished a quest with Roche a few hours of gameplay ago, there was some kerfuffle of re-introducing him as a character, that made us wonder whether the right save was loaded. But I had by then recollected the ending in water of the previous session, so I reassured DF that this was in fact the right save. 

Roche was square-jawed and noble at us for a bit, and we got a quest to go save Ves (Shirt Open Girl) from herself, which seems sort of weird/dumb but like, I guess, that’s, what’s going on? OK cool. On the way out of the cave, DF accidentally made Geralt walk through a bonfire and set himself dramatically on fire, but it does tend to go out quickly enough when that happens. So, for the record, Witchers are slightly fire-retardant. (@akilah12902​ informs me Quen will put you out if you’re on fire, as well as stopping bleeding, so that’s a useful bit of knowledge. We did not utilize this knowledge. DF maintains an irrational prejudice against Quen, in part because to be fair it’s fairly useless in Death March mode.)

Now, I’d forgotten, but the steel sword Geralt currently has is like, this ridiculous fucking scythe of a Fantasy Blade that clips straight through the scabbard and looks goddamned silly. My dude, who has only ever been present for one other episode of this game play, was like “... what is that sword. That’s a big sword.” And the rest of us were laughing too hard to get out a “that’s what she said”.

Anyhow. We met up with Roche in some godawful countryside with hanged peasants, where Ves was off on a mad chase to try to keep Nilfgaardian soldiers from executing peasants on suspicion of being partisans. 

We instantly died as soon as the fight started. Whoops. 

“That’s ok,” says DF, “now I know how the controls work.”

“Well,” my dude suggested, “is it time for Gwent now?”

Ah, so he does know how this game works. Maybe. DF meandered through the inventory screen after the game reloaded, taking a moment to equip himself, and my dude proved that no, in fact, he hasn’t seen much of this, when he asked “wait is that just raw meat?” and DF was like “crunch crunch!”

Geralt instantly got polearmed to death on the reload. “Shit,” said DF, “we gotta grease up for this.” And part of the quest is that we have to save Ves, and she’s got a status bar displayed with her health and it’s getting lower and lower as we fuck around. “All right,” DF said, “we juicin’,” and decocted himself up. 

This time he started off the fight by setting a bunch of Nilfgaardians on fire. Some of them are kind of fire-resistant too. It is super, super, super fucking handy that your enemies are by default fire-resistant, because you can just Igni a crowd and only burn your enemies. 

We did manage to rescue Ves. Finally, finally, someone else noticed she’s not really wearing a shirt, and was like, “why is your navel showing” and she was like “none of your business” which I suppose is a reasonable answer.

At the end there was one wounded Nilfgaardian and Roche was like “ah we should be merciful” and I get that Geralt’s supposed to be noble here, but like, the guy’s fucked up and there’s no medicine in this game and also, as Geralt pointed out, he takes jobs for Nilfgaard sometimes, having a survivor to go and be like “yah this white-haired Witcher showed up and fucked us all up” would be fucking awkward, so DF opted for the dialogue option of “why leave a witness alive to linger in agony what kind of mercy is that really”, and maybe that was wrong but we went on with our lives.

Meanwhile, the children of the village have come out, since the fight is over. DF ran Geralt around to loot the bodies and there were children literally playing on top of the corpses in several cases, which was a bit annoying and also disturbing. Like... guys. 

Anyway. We poked through the loot, and switched out the lovely matching Griffin armor for a ridiculous Guy Fiery flame-patterned sash gambeson, but the stats are better so. Welcome to Flavortown I guess.

We decided to go Check Out The Devil’s Pit. It sounds badass. We wandered away picking flowers and killing lvl 6 nekkers. We found a bandit camp with a lot of wooden staircases and chased people around and killed them, but it wasn’t super exciting, there was a random pit to hell that you couldn’t interact with in any way. Maybe it was supposed to be a mine? I don’t know.

Just to see what would happen, DF Igni’d a goat. “Rude!” Dude exclaimed, but we actually did manage to loot the meat so this went down better than the Skellige Bunny Crimes incident. 

Anyhow. Radovid wants us to repay him for giving us Junior by going and getting him Phillippa Englebreit. Earheart. Whatever. He’s got a bunch of witch hunters posted up outside her hideout-- apparently they chased her there as an owl, which sounds like a really great high-speed chase I’m sorry there’s apparently no depiction of.

So we started off by talking to the witch hunters, who were kind of... they’re a bunch of thugs with dorky chinstraps and bowl haircuts and they’re rude to Geralt, so like, fuck those guys. 

We left the rude dorks behind and went down into the weird compound. There were some Aardable walls and some debris. “Ah, nekkers,” said DF. 

“They just want to neck with you,” put in MM.

They did not. They cornered Geralt, who wound up stuck in a dead-end passage without an escape except falling to his death, so he fell to his death. Whoops. Reloaded, had some more difficulties with the nekkers, realized belatedly that they need ogroid oil, duh. 

Properly lubed, we resumed our fight and in the midst of it, leveled up to Level 17. Not too shabby. We also recollected that nekkers do not like being on fire, which, being a guy who can produce fire from his hands on command, that’s a useful bit of information and made things go much more smoothly. Also also, DF realized belatedly he’d been using his steel sword instead of the silver one for the nekkers, which also explained why he’d been doing so poorly. Right, right, that’s how this game works. (I pointed it out. “Wait, isn’t that your steel sword? The huge one?” and DF was like “That’s my pork sword” and we all groaned at him, but like. I’d asked for that, pretty much, hadn’t I.)

One of the nekkers dropped “Monster Bone” as loot, which Dude saw and started singing. “Monster boooooone,” he sang, and MM and I were like “Yeahhhh” in unison and DF was like “Monster Bone sounds like the name of a funk album”

Then there was a roaring fire creature, an Ifrit or somesuch, which, like, well. It was on fire, so we figured it was probably an elementa or something. Also Aard puts out fires sometimes, which did help with this. 

“Oh,” DF said, “he’s killable,” and proceeded to kill him. When he disappeared I was like “oh, he teleports?” but then he didn’t reappear, and DF was like, “No, he doesn’t teleport, I just obliterated him.” Oh. 

In Philippa’s lair, where she was not (though there were owl feathers), we perused the assorted loot. Blood-covered gemstones seemed like a really really odd thing to find, until we discovered that she’d been using them to grow new tissue on to replace her eyeballs that Radovid had removed for her, which is just gross all around. Also, we picked up a book called Care For Your Sword, Soldier! which is far more peppy than I’d expect for the subject matter. We also got a chipped megascope crystal, which seemed useful and important. 

So, now it was time to pick a fight with the fucking witch-hunters, apparently. There might’ve been a way not to fight them but fuck those guys. “Time,” DF said with some satisfaction, “for some Axii executions.” Oh, and Dude Oil. Mustn’t forget to lubricate for dudes. 

“Why,” I asked, as we killed another witch hunter, “does everyone drop creepy dolls as loot?” Why on earth wouldn’t a middle-aged religious fanatic with a bizarre uniform and a bowl cut have a creepy doll on him? Why indeed. 

Anyway. We left the cave, and the dead witch hunters, and made a beeline for Triss in Novigrad to see what she thinks. We trust her more than Radovid; maybe she did some weird bullshit to Geralt in the past but at least she doesn’t seem to think chessmen have literal pulses. “We find her terrible fake American accent endearing,” DF said. As we spoke to her, she clipped through a chair twice. 

We gave her the megascope crystal, and she played back whatever message she could find on it, which was Phillippa talking to... some other sorceress... about regrowing her eyeballs. Well, fair subject matter I guess.

We left, and wandered through Novigrad. “Giant-ass sword,” DF muttered to himself, watching the Stupid Fantasy Blade clip through the scabbard again. And Whoreson Jr still got shooters out here, who keep trying to kill Geralt, and I’d almost suggest that they know Geralt killed Jr but if they know Jr is dead why are they still in his gang? Very confusing. 

Anyway. I had something deep to observe, here, that Dude pointed out, about the whole ecosystem thing here, and I just can’t recollect what it was, so I’m gonna leave this in drafts a tiny bit longer as I try to remember what the fuck it was. Ah, I don’t remember. Someone tell me a punchline!

[bomberqueen17]

UNDERCUT ACHIEVED

DF FINALLY RELENTED AND GOT GERALT THE UNDERCUT

JUST IN TIME FOR DANDELION’S HETEROSEXUAL NONSENSE QUEST

but at the cost of subjecting us to the soul patch. You know what I like the soul patch better than I like the muttonchops so

I had convinced myself I didn’t care but then the next cutscene happened and it was the one with the godling in the house and he looked so solicitous, like he does with godlings, and oh my gosh he just looked so good with the undercut??? Dang y’all, why do they even let you have any other hairstyles with him???

anyway

the literal first thing that happened when we booted up the Witcher 3 was that DF went into the inventory screen to prepare for the fight that had killed him last time, and was scrolling through what he terms his “collection of massage oils”, and muttering the names. He said “Enhanced Insectoid Oil” and MM, who hadn’t been paying attention, perked right up and said “Enhanced Sex Toy Oil??” with great excitement.

Alas. No. What we needed was Hanged Man’s Venom, which we now universally call Dude Oil.

also, an update on a prior installment-- you maybe thought I was kidding about Geralt’s Awkward Creepy Horny lines but I just saw a gifset go by that contained the one about the funeral.

[image description: a moving gif of Yennefer, a black-haired woman, standing next to Geralt, a silver-haired man with a full beard, both facing forward and not looking at one another. Geralt: You smell wonderful. Yennefer, looking resigned/disgusted: Geralt-- we’re at a funeral. Geralt, smiling and raising his eyebrows: You smell wonderful at this funeral.]

Anyhow. Ahem. Geralt, you’re a fucking disaster.

This is the quest for Lambert: Hammond is one of the cronies of Karadin, who’d murdered Aiden, Lambert’s boyfriend. He’s in some little settlement on Skellige and there are guards at the gate and just pirates all through the place. They’re all like... levels 9 through 12, and there are a fuckton of archers.

DF tried three times to do his usual approach with bandits, which at this point is Dude Oil, Axii, and lots of swording. But they kept killing him by sheer dint of numbers, and since in Death March it doesn’t seem to matter how full your health bar is, Quen only lasts one hit, it was literally not worth casting it most of the time.

So on the third attempt he potioned himself the fuck up with some new decoction that gave him health when he inflicted damage on other people, which was pretty brutally effective. With that, and some judicious luring-out of opponents, and using Igni whenever there was a group of them,and a lot of hiding behind obstacles to avoid archers, he managed to clear out the whole settlement. I’m not sure of this, as there was a lot of ambient noise, but at one point I swear Geralt yelled “Shut up!” at a man who was screaming because Geralt had set him on fire a moment before. Like... pick your battles man, but like whatever.

Along the way, we found Orders From Hammond on several of the pirates/whatevers/guards. They were all the same. They were not complex. “Why the fuck would this guy write out simple orders and hand out multiple copies to illiterate guardsmen?” I asked. “Well, for the plot,” DF said. “No-- I want an in-universe explanation for this.” “Ahh,” MM said, “he has a letterpress, obviously.” “Oh, and since he has one--” “I mean, wouldn’t you letterpress literally everything you ever had cause to commit to writing?” “I mean-- hell yes? I would find reasons to commit things unnecessarily to writing.” “So. Hammond has a letterpress and he’s very proud of it.” “This is the obvious conclusion, yes.” “If I was a pirate with a letterpress you bet your ass I’d letterpress every fucking thought that ever crossed my mind.”

“Alright,” DF said, “I gotta reapply my Dude Oil.”

MM snorted. “Sorry,” she said, “the mental image every time you say--”

“Why do you think I say it?” DF said.

We made it up to where Hammond was praying. He was Beefy and was for some reason wearing a kilt with a leg slit which entirely removes the point of wearing a kilt. Anyway, he was challenging to kill but not that challenging, and then he had a Letter On Fancy Stationery from our target, Karadin. The letter referenced the slave trade, just as some bystander earlier had.

“I,” DF said, “am ready to get the fuck out of here,” and zipped off to the nearest fast-travel point.  Bickety-bam, we were in Hierarch Square in Novigrad again.

He did some light shopping, selling junk etc., and he was still hopped-to-fuck on potions, though most of the cutscene dialogue didn’t show the toxicity in his face for whatever reason.

So, we went and met up with Lambert, who had the scoop on his boyfriend’s murderer. “He’s a slaver,” Lambert said, “but he’s remade his life and does a bunch of charity work and has a new name and all. Fancy mansion yadda yadda.”

So we went to meet Lambert there, and went in and the guy’s got a wife and a couple of kids and... is, himself, a Witcher. He’s a Cat school alumnus who adopted a couple of kids and their widowed mom, and now has rebranded himself as an upstanding businessman. Fine nice clothes, just one sword, totally reformed. Totally!

The dialogue options don’t give you any way to ask him about the slave trading. “But just Lambert said that,” DF pointed out, “we don’t know that it’s true.” “Uh,” I said, “like five different people have said that, I don’t actually think this is in any way hearsay.” MM was like “LAMBERT IS YOUR BROTHER YOU BACK HIM UP RIGHT NOW.” “Yeesh OK,” DF said, and told Karadin he was a lying sack of shit.

There ensued a fight, and Karadin led off by immediately jumping over and hitting Geralt super hard, but in the amount of time it took DF to pick an oil for Geralt’s blade, and to hit him a couple of times and then back off, Lambert had absolutely destroyed the guy, and he was dead before Geralt could even really get a lick in. (Lambert is so far the only NPC who has ever been a lick of good in a fight, as it happens.)

Lambert, like, spat on him and walked away after that, and Geralt was like “welp” and left too.

In consolation, DF betook himself to a barber shop, where he gave Geralt a terrible soul patch and moustache combo, but made up for it immediately by going for the undercut, which is, oh my gosh, it’s so good why do they let him have any other hair?????

we then did the Dreaming quest, which as a level 7 quest gave us 0 xp but we needed it for Plot. So we hunted around a house to find, of all things, a godling, with whom Geralt was exactly as solicitous and gentle as he had been with Johnny-- this one was causing harm, having trapped an oneiromancer in terrible scary nightmares, but she herself thought scary dreams were fun and was only trying to play. Geralt made a deal with her, that she’d free the woman from the dreams and let him talk to her, and in return he’d tell the house’s owner that it was permanently haunted and couldn’t be fixed, thereby leaving it safe for the godling to live in. She agreed, and told him, “Gee, Mister Witcher, you’re a really nice person,” and the cutscene showed Geralt’s face and he looked honestly sort of taken aback and delighted (and also hot, because, undercut). With great sincerity, he smiled slightly and said, “Thank you, people don’t often say so.”

The dialogue gave you the chance to go back on it, but DF was like, “I told the godling I’d lie for her, I can’t go back on that now,” and agreed to it.

During the quest he’d had to Aard a few blocked doors and wall bits and things. “Home renovations by Geralt of Rivia,” I said. “I’m good at demo,” DF said. I texted the preceding exchange to @akilah12902​ who had a fantastic punchline: "everything else I have subcontractors for"

On the way out of the quest we SAW THE WEIRD RAT PARADE GLITCH AGAIN. I must know, is this a thing??? What the fuck??? it did the same thing, sort of snaking eerily through the market, and then got stuck under the same cart in the same way, and that was it. WEIRD AND FREAKY. Anyhow.

The oneiromancer that the godling had trapped was a sorceress wearing even less of a shirt than Kiera, who we then had to go see. She met us in an inn, and was like, “I’ll help you find your missing woman, now tell me about her.” Geralt makes much of being reluctant to talk, but then she makes it easy to go through the dialogue tree and share every single anecdote of Ciri that he’s got loaded up, so we found out a bunch of backstory that way. Geralt gets a little misty-eyed in the recitation.

He then proceeds to dream of Dandelion, who we haven’t seen at all yet. He’s in a fantastic, almost bejeweled-looking doublet, absolutely resplendent, remonstrating with a barn swallow. So......... that whole entire quest was just to tell us that since we’ve already talked to everyone else in town that Ciri would know, we should find the last person she’d know, who is Dandelion. But, I guess without the quest we wouldn’t know where to look for him, so. (He owns a brothel now? Gross? Well, why not. I am prepared not to like Dandelion very much.)

Anyhow-- that was enough excitement, and we betook ourselves to bed after that.

Tonight probably won’t have much playing either; we’re all overtired and Girl keeps coming down the stairs to ask one more question and it’s two hours past her bedtime and she’s overtired and driving us all nuts, so. Ugh.

[bomberqueen17]

Junk Dealing

So, my dude has come out to visit for the weekend. (Our isolation circle is this family, plus him, plus his mom, and nobody sees anybody else. it’s weird and involves the Thruway. w-ev.) We were like, well, if there’s a Responsible Adult here we should do something civilized like watch a movie or TV show or something, but my dude was like, no no, I want to understand why you all talk about a video game constantly, and I’ve seen the show so I should have some notion what’s going on anyway right? so hook me up.

SO... we fired up the Xbox.

Now, some background: my dude had arrived at about 2pm and had brought with him the fixins to make margaritas, and so by that point I had made two pitchers of margaritas, one over the rocks and one frozen in the blender, and we’d also done side-by-side taste tests of the two kinds of tequila and one of mezcal that were in the house, and there was also a six-pack of Corona beer that this morning there were still two left of but I don’t know where the other four went, and like. Anyway, this was not an evening of restraint. We weren’t, like, heavily intoxicated? but we had certainly over-indulged a bit, festively. 

So we sat down and DF was like, well, fuck, I do not have the coordination to do any important quests tonight. This is probably a good opportunity to clear up some of these lil question marks and just... bum around. 

We came to in a camp full of bandits. Oh yeah, we died there last time. [“These renegades aren’t even renegades of funk,” DF said disapprovingly.] Well, wasting all the bandits was easy enough and then the refugees came back and were happy. And then DF took it upon himself to Igni the several beehives that were in the camp, and that would’ve been fine except that a) the camp was full of refugees so he deffo igni’d somebody’s grandma, and b) the camp also had the kind of barrels that explode when you igni them and those went up like Guy Fawkes Day and ... weirdly didn’t kill any refugees, just made them... faint? and then they got up again? and nobody was mad about this? but we were distressed (we spectators; DF was not, he was like “I’m making this camp safer, those exploding barrels were a hazard, what if some guy who can make fire from his hands came in here and lit them? I’m just getting them out of the way”). 

But then Jenny From The Block showed up [the quest is Jenny O’ The Woods and she’s a nightwraith and we’d only gone to fight the bandits to kill time until night so she’d show up anyway, right, I remember now] and it very rapidly became apparent that DF was slightly too tipsy to actually manage to kill a slightly-overpowered wraith. It wasn’t that his coordination was affected so much as that his concentration was, and it was too much. 

The upside is that Geralt respawned back before he’d Igni’d grandma, so we could go on our way with clearer consciences. (Not that DF’s conscience seemed to be in any way clouded, but the rest of us had been troubled. “Whatever,” he said. “They were weeping before, they’re not any sadder now.”)

So we fucked off into the countryside, half-intending on heading back to the crones or whatever, but then thinking, well, why not just ramble the countryside and kill whatever we find? 

Some level 4 drowners murdered Geralt rather handily, which was a little sobering. Also we realized that the Corona was actually the lo-carb version, which doesn’t tell you how much alcohol is in it. (Google assured us that it’s 4% ABV, so DF could continue using it to hydrate himself.)

“What is that thing?” my dude asked. It was possibly a dead whale; we had reached the coast. 

“I dunno,” DF said, “but I can stand on it majestically.” It was sunrise, gorgeously so, and he panned the camera down to look up at Geralt from slightly below, for maximum majesty. 

Then he got into the sea, for reasons unknown. We discovered there that drowners will drown you. Oh, it’s not just a clever name. They didn’t succeed, this time. 

DF said, “I just want to point out, you know, that when Keanu Reeves did Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure? Back then? I believed in him then. I was with him before he was cool.”

Then he was attacked by pirates. “What the shit! We’ve never seen pirates before!” Pirates are just like bandits, only with even weirder accents, and slightly more crossbows. Geralt attempted to hide behind a tree until their crossbow guy lost interest, but it didn’t help much. He also discovered that pirates are slightly harder to set fire to than bandits, possibly because they are salty? Inconclusive. 

Every single dead pirate had a dumpling on him, though, which was nice. And we got an enhanced Griffin steel sword diagram, so that was nice. And one of the pirates had a chicken sandwich! Sweet. Fancy new mauve gauntlets that clash less badly with the orange and black gambeson than the old teal ones. 

Another question mark in the water and we dived in, and scored some ducal water, so we don’t have to milk a duke for it. Also some trousers, possibly improved? DF pulled up the inventory screen and we enjoyed a little fashion show, deciding which pants to wear. The one pair was rather puffy and didn’t show off Geralt’s shapely thighs, which. We don’t need to see them to know they’re there, but it does help. 

Somewhere in here DF decided he was only ever going to get onto Roach by leaping over her hindquarters, never again from the side like a normal person. This often necessitated quite a long pause while he manoevered around trying to get into the correct position to do it, and sometimes he’d have to get back off the horse in order to try again. 

It’s Pirate Central by the Coast of Wrecks, and nobody’s got a shirt on. “Nobody wears shirts at the beach,” MM pointed out. “Yeah only a Poindexter wears a shirt at the beach,” my dude puts in. “You should take Geralt’s shirt off,” I said, but DF was not down. 

He killed all the pirates, looted their beer, and then went around putting out every open fire in the campsite again. “Safety’s important,” he said. “Also, you fuckers, I put out your fire, take that.” He passed by a lantern. “That’s contained, gonna leave it.” 

At this point suddenly we ran up hard against the item-carry limit. Geralt was now so overburdened that he could not run or roll, and could only walk slowly. We had to either throw a lot of things away, or sell them. “Just throw out the broken rakes,” I said, and MM said, “You say that to the son of [DF’s mom]???” “Fair,” I said. [DF’s mom has. Hm. Some hoarding behaviors.] We broke out in a round of My Humps, proving again that we are ancient, but like. Whatchoo gonna do with all that junk, all that junk inside your trunk?? We couldn’t not.

One of the things was a note that the pirates wrote to themselves-- an awful lot of bandits and pirates and smugglers seem to have this habit of writing really oddly heartfelt notes about their hopes, dreams, and immediate goals? And then leaving those things around. 

We fast-traveled back to a town to sell some shit to make room in inventory for all our pirate plunder, but it was 2am and nobody was up. We were forced to awkwardly meditate in some dude’s yard for four hours in order to be able to accost him at dawn to sell our things. 

“He’s gonna run out of money before I run out of stuff,” DF observed somewhat morosely. “Could you buy something in return?” I suggested. “He doesn’t have anything i want,” DF said. “I can get my shit repaired but that’s like. 20 crowns.” “Ooh,” I said, struck by my own genius, “maybe you can purchase sexual favors from him, that’s something Geralt could probably use!”  “Listen, I’ll give you $20 to suck my dick, and then you can use that money to buy the rest of my broken rakes.”

In the end, the merchant had four fucktillion Velen longswords to sell to new bandits so the circle of life, as DF put it, could continue. 

Meanwhile, I had noticed one of the lights in the room behaving oddly, and somehow between MM and myself, we had gotten so worked up with amusement that we were semi-incoherent with laughter, and in the midst of it I pointed up at the light and hollered out “THAT WOULD BE AN ELECTRICAL MATTER” [link is to the scene from Father Ted that’s a reference to] and we all wound up absolutely paralyzed with incoherent choking laughter for like. Five minutes. It was so dumb. It was absolutely hilarious. I’m never going to be able to look at that ceiling light again without cracking up.

So. Quality times. 

We sobered up a little over meeting a lynch mob and being semi-forced to kill them. Either you walk away and let them string up a guy for having the audacity to try to buy food in their town, or you have to murder a bunch of idiot peasants. We opted for the latter and got 20 xp for it, but it was still sort of crappy all around. 

Anyway. We resumed our terrorizing of the Pirate Coast, and my notes got a lot less coherent. 

“why am i punching! where’s my sword?” DF demanded, as he accidentally attacked a pirate with his bare fists. 

“You sold it to the guy who sucked your dick,” I said. (This was a joke, he hadn’t sold *all* his swords. 

“i’m jus gong to cut the arms off a bunch of topless men for everyone’s entertainment,” DF said, rampaging through a bunch of scantily-clad pirate dudes. The loot included yet more fisstech! “that’s going in my fisstech collection,” DF said. We’ve decided never to sell fisstech, since it’s evil, but as you can’t really do anything with it, that means he’s just collecting more and more and more of it. 

“i just got a key to a cage,” DF said. “i hope it’s a guy who’ll either buy my shit or suck my dick, i’m full again. oh it’s a barber! can i get a wet towel shave?” “... Those are called hot towel shaves, my dude.”

YES UNDERPANTS FIGHT CLUB

(the trousers Geralt’s currently in, when he’s not wearing a gambeson over the top, just leave his ass hanging out in underpants, and since he takes his shirt off for the fistfighting quest, it definitely has become the Underpants Fight Club.

FIST OF THE SOUTH STAR ok that’s an anime reference thanks guys very clever

of a merchant: “will she take my junk??”

We went to Kiera Metz and got given the Plague Maiden quest. Kiera gives us a xenovox, which is deffo a Plot Device. oh shit this quest is only a level 6? we need to do it before we level up too much to get cred for it. 

Kiera’s going to rely on “feminine intuition” to know when to reach out and check up on Geralt??? A MAN WROTE THAT. “Oh my lady parts are tingling! Geralt’s in trouble!” Come the fuck on!

AH fuck level 4 drowners hit awful hard considering we’re level 9. is wee precious flower prince geralt too big for his britches???

this is like a carnival of all the different necrophages. Welcome to Necrophage Carnival Island. Mind the exploding rotfiends.

both MM and my dude are passed the fuck out on their respective couches, completely unconscious. maybe we should leave them there.

At some point I stopped taking notes, but Geralt fast-traveled from the island Kiera Metz had sent him to to Novigrad in order to once and for all clear out his inventory, and that went just fine but then on his way out, DF navigated Geralt to hop over a low railing in order to shortcut to another street, and wound up plummeting dramatically to his death off a high cliff. whoops shit

we decided it was time for bed, at that point. 

[bomberqueen17]

geralt says fuck cops

so we resume our tale on the streets of Novigrad, with Aiden’s murderers punished and Lambert off to parts unknown. (The post title begs the question: are the witch hunters really cops? I say so and I say fuck ‘em.)

We went to the Rosemary and Thyme, which is a brothel that Dandelion recently inherited. Once there, we immediately were confronted with a dwarf named Zoltan flinging some ne’er-do-wells out a door. Apparently Geralt knows Zoltan, as he seemed delighted to see him. Zoltan was in return delighted to see Geralt, because he had time to utter a happy greeting and cordially invite Geralt to help him in a fistfight. A mob came through the door, and we immediately had to leap into the fray.

We died, of course, because that’s a thing that happens to Geralt distressingly often in Death March mode: he gets literally killed in fistfights. Argh. 

So, behind the cut is more about this sort of gross quest which treads that fine line that Witcher 3 is so good at-- This Is A Little Bit Gross And Has A Slightly Misogynist Premise, But Geralt Himself Is Largely Not Gross And Mostly Manages To Be Respectful About It (mostly?), So Enjoy That Entirely Unnecessary Mindfuck. 

“Wait,” I said, “can you use a blackjack in a fistfight???” “Maybe we shouldn’t have been declining to loot those all along,” DF said. 

So we reloaded, and this time survived, largely because Zoltan did most of the fighting. 

(As an aside, apparently Zoltan bears a truly uncanny resemblance to a coworker of DF’s, who is a very short, stocky, gay biker with a mohawk. So every goddamn scene he’d be like “Jack, it’s super weird to see you here.”)

To regen health, you consume food. Various loot lately has been booze so DF figured why the fuck not and downed a bottle of wine. So we had to search the Rosemary and Thyme while drunk, which in Geralt’s case means sort of tunnel-visioned and unsteady. Kind of hilarious, no other consequences, the effects lasted a couple of minutes and the health regen actually worked, so whatever. 

So it’s Dandelion’s brothel, but he’s gone missing. To find him, Zoltan and Geralt find his dayplanner and find his list of recent meetings, every one of which is a woman (with one semi-exception, tw for weird treatment of a gender-non-conforming person-- I say weird because it’s... just sort of weird and clumsy and you don’t have any really respectful dialogue options but it’s not like, actively... mean? I don’t know, brace yourselves my friends; also brace yourselves because the entire quest is that Dandelion Lies To His Trollops, And That’s Kinda Funny, which is not exactly not-gross. At least Geralt is reasonably gentle about it with most of them, and is clearly disgusted by his bro’s behavior, not that he’s not enabling him...). So Zoltan tears the page in half and says “Geralt you take this half, I’ll take that.” And off we went.

(Well, we searched the place first, and found nothing interesting, so whatever.)

Apparently there’s only one woman who isn’t a dead end, and I was spoilered for which one, and offered the spoiler to DF, but he declined-- the first one was like, right there, so why not, let’s go. Annnnnd it turns out you get MASSIVE XP just for talking to each woman, so that’s worth doing. 

The first one was a laundress, and Geralt saves her nobly from Whoreson Jr’s men shaking her down for protection money-- by dismembering them into bloody bits all over her washing. She’s not that excited about this, and Geralt is sarcastic; he seems to have no appreciation for the finer points of laundry.

The next one is... oh. The weird one. It’s a man, or well a male elf, who runs a tailor’s shop, and when Geralt is confused because he expected a woman, the man leaves the room and comes back dressed as a woman (like, dress, makeup, but still the same hair), and Geralt is visibly discomfited and most of the dialogue options seem to be him being like “ew weird”, but DF, to his credit, was like, “I’m not fucking asking him why he’s fucking dressed like that, that’s a gross way of phrasing it, no thank you” so we muddled through as best we could with the other bits of the dialogue tree. The man (I think it’s meant to be clear that he still uses male pronouns?) makes it clear that he and Dandelion never had a sexual relationship and in fact he is completely and explicitly disinterested in pursuing men, and that’s fine, and DF was like ugh why did they have to make this weird. Like... I could see that maybe they assume their target audience would be weirded out but like, it wouldn’t have taken much to make it not weird, it doesn’t have to be like, perfect-- just, like, it doesn’t work as a joke (was it supposed to be funny??) and it doesn’t work seriously so what is it doing here; it would have been enormously improved by like, the tiniest bit of uhhh maybe a sensitivity reader or something. I don’t know what they were going for. Anyway...  We got the info we were supposed to get, got the XP, and bought some stuff from the tailor shop that had some yellow exclamation points next to it. (Masquerade masks. why not.)

This boosted us to level 14 and DF realized he had, like, a pile of Experience Points to distribute. (There’s a mechanism in the game where you get, like, a point per level plus a point every so often from something else, and you can take those points and distribute them into a Skill Tree thing that makes you better at fighting, Signs, recovery, things like that. So your Signs can individually get more powerful as you gain points. You need to level up Axii in order to access certain dialogue tree options, for example (only in a few quests but still, they exist); you can also put points into your strong attacks to make them stronger. Things like that.) “Level up Quen so it’s worth using,” I said. “What’s with you and Quen?!” DF said. “I don’t like it when Geralt gets hit,” I confessed. He laughed, and gave Geralt the ability to regenerate health off of adrenaline points instead, so (hopefully) he’s much more difficult to kill. We’ll see which of us was right, soon enough, most likely.

We were beset by witch hunters at this point. Not because Geralt has been killing cops and murdering his way through the city-- no, but because on our first day in Novigrod which in game-time is like a month ago now, we got harangued by a priest of the Eternal Fire and verbally humiliated him in front of a crowd of people. The witch hunters tell Geralt he’s under arrest and he should hand over his swords. Geralt’s dialogue options are “give me a receipt for them” or “over my dead body” and we dithered for a moment, but I was like “we’ve killed so many cops, what’s two more?” and DF was like “Fair” so we opted to fight. 

Turns out we slaughtered them, consequence-free, and went off into the night two chicken sandwiches richer for the experience. (Why does every single thug have a lunch entree. It’s so odd.) In the midst of the fight an unrelated NPC glitched straight through the combat and unconcernedly kept walking, as Geralt rained down a hail of sword blows directly through his body onto one of the witch hunters. It was... interesting. 

It just sort of makes me remember... I think circa 1998... I had mono and was in Norway over Christmas break and my cousin would play Grand Theft Auto on the computer and I did not have the energy do to anything but sit there and watch him and part of the game mechanism was that as you committed crimes you’d get more and more cops following you around with sirens on and you’d eventually have to do something to clear them off your trail but if you didn’t you could wind up leading this like, high-speed parade of you plus a hundred cop cars around the city. I’m just envisioning that happening in Novigrod with Geralt, where he’s just wandering around and there’s like, a hundred guards after him, and he’s just going about his business and trying to stay ahead of them like a demented game of Snake.

Anyway, that doesn’t happen in Witcher 3, as far as I can tell, but the mental image is amusing. 

Immediately after the encounter with the witch hunters, we walked down an alley and Geralt automatically got into a fight to the death with some thugs who their over-the-head title text informed us were Whoreson Jr’s men. I guess we’re at war with Whoreson Jr., so that’s cool, there was basically no volition in this but I don’t imagine we’re going to wish we were friends with him instead. So Geralt hacked his way through the next pile of thugs-- like, there was no volition here, he just got within proximity of them and just-- threw hands-- we were like okay i guess this is how this works. Amusingly, every thug had a lunch entree except one, who was a man wearing only braies but his loot was a shirt. WTF. 

Anyway we show up at the next place and it’s 2 am and raining, and this noblewoman just happens to be stepping out onto her porch, dressed in the weirdest fucking dress we’ve seen so far this series-- it looks like a normal dress suspended from a bright red bra, for no reason-- but who knows. 

So the noblewoman, whose name I forget, is accompanied by Morvran Voorhis, a Nilfaardian nobleman who I know from Astolat’s fanfic. He is slightly off-putting at first but winds up to be wholesomely obsessed with horses and refreshingly straightforward about it? So we go to the races with him and wind up riding a horse in a race and-- well, DF got stuck in a fence ten feet shy of the finish line, lost, and rage-reloaded the game from the last save point because that was so annoying, but that means that I know whether geralt wins or loses the race everyone is super nice about it for once.

Anyway on the reload Geralt ran out of horse juice but still managed to win the race. After that, we got to talk to Molly, who Dandelion had clearly been stringing along. She was also none too bright, but innocently told us all about Dandelion’s sister. Geralt gamely tried to go along with Dandelion’s lies, I think partly to be a good bro but also, I felt, because it would have bee sort of cruel to disillusion the poor woman, but eventually even still he had to be like... girl he doesn’t have a sister and I need to know who that woman actually was. 

We didn’t really find out, but presumably we got all the info we needed, because the quest updated and gave us our XP. So... we made nice with Voorhis and traveled with him back to Novigrad because otherwise it was going to be rather a slog to the closest fast travel marker, and once there we decided to leave the last woman, Rose Var Attre, for the next day.

[bomberqueen17]

[this is Johnny the godling, whose first appearance I wrote up in my Wee Precious Flower Prince Geralt entry entitled Defecating To The Sunrise.]

[bomberqueen17]

we took the wyverns on a tour of the coast by boat

I’m finally caught up-- we didn’t play last night, DF was on the phone with his dad and it was the kind of call where he paced around the entire exterior of the house being really heavily-accented into his phone headset, which alarmed me quite a bit when he walked past the window of the room I was in because I hadn’t expected anyone to be outside. 

So we went to bed early while he was still on the phone but then I didn’t go to sleep, like a fool, but I also wrote a bunch of the next Ancient Sea chapter so that was great. Mixed success. And, he’s on call tonight, so he’ll probably be at work overnight and we won’t play tonight either, so we’ll see. 

BUT. The night before last, we had a good long Witchering session with some fucking around AND some plot, and we drank the cocktail I had invented, the Yennefer. Here’s the recipe, and behind the cut I’ll explain the Saga of Trollololo and also the exciting Adventure of the Magical Towels.

edited to add ok all this was delayed one MORE day, but also DF’s shift went so late we assumed he was working an overnight until at 11:30 the household was awakened by someone opening every cabinet in the kitchen and then he stumbled up to bed, and then had to go in this morning at his usual 7am start time because doctors’ hours fucking suck, so actually I’ve had two extra days to write this and have not. I have no excuses, but you’ll see what else I’ve been working on eventually, I promise. ANYHOW back to the post, with a recipe.

The Yennefer, a cocktail:

1) Cut the blooms off of a lilac bush until you’ve got enough. Pick the little purple bits very carefully off the tiny green stems. (I got about four cups. It took forever.) Rinse them in cold water if you think they might be dusty. I didn’t, I’m a slob. Make lilac syrup by putting two parts of lilac petals to one part sugar and one part water, bringing it to a simmer, turning it off, letting it cool, and letting it sit for 12-24 hours. Then strain it. TheSpruceEats promised me it wouldn’t be bitter if I sat there like a... well, you gotta channel the hyperfocus here, for good or ill... and picked out every tiny green stem, but they lied; the resulting syrup was sweet and flowery and had a pronounced bitter note to it. HOWEVER, this is Yennefer, so that is perfectly copacetic. 2) I bought a container of sweet candied gooseberries at the Asia Mart a while back (when the grocery stores were wiped out and the asian supermarkets were untouched because of racism), these in fact, so I poured boiling water over a bunch of those and the extra sugar that was loose at the bottom of the package, and wound up with a sweet-tart fruity sort of syrup. (Lacking those, I might have used some cranberry juice.) 3) Combine those two syrups until the taste pleases you somewhat and is slightly too sweet. (I added a little unflavored simple syrup.) Then, add a correct amount of either gin, or white rum if you don’t like gin. (My test batch was fantastic with gin, but MM hates gin, so I used rum for this version.) 4) put in a bit of lemon and/or lime juice to make it more tart, as needed.  5) optional: add other herbal/flowery liqueurs to taste. I had this botanical spirit named Hum that’s red, and I had some blue Cointreau that I put a couple of drops in for color, and I had a little bit of creme de violette. 

My Drink Mixing Method is largely that I figure out how many servings I’m making, put in one to two ounces of the hard liquor per serving, and then put in about one part of the combined mixers per one part of the hard liquor, and then I adjust the flavors until it’s the strength I want (I often wind up with much more mixer, up to two parts per one part of hard liquor, but that varies). Most of my drinks are designed to be served over ice to bring them down to the correct dilution.

tw below for assisted suicide, in-game, expressly nothing to do with any real-life things.

We started strong. I poured the drinks, and DF dithered about having any-- he has awful heartburn problems and tries to have only water after 5pm unless he’s prepared to Accept The Consequences, but he decided he’d try a cocktail. He asked if MM would put it over ice for him, so she got out the bag of ice in the freezer and discovered it had sort of bricked. He suggested banging it on the floor to break it up, and she had a reply to that which would be much funnier if I had not explained all this, but I have, so:

“I’m not planning on banging right now,” she said, swanning into the room in her particularly magnificent way of walking, with a drink in each hand. 

(I know I’ve set the setting-scene before but it’s worth mentioning that MathMom is a stunningly beautiful and of course deeply eccentric woman, tallish and solid-built with classic-length (that’s upper mid-thigh) thick wavy pale-brown hair with natural golden highlights which she often wears in a magnificent crown braid across the top of her head held in place with an array of jeweled and tortoise-shell clips, and she has a predilection for lace-bedecked long skirts, lots of embroidery and hand-embellished trims, lily-white bare arms of astonishingly muscular slenderness, and often a headband with lace cat ears when she’s feeling particularly emotionally-drained. Oh and jewelry, she has a lot of jewelry, some of which is expensive shit inherited from a wealthy aunt who died suddenly 20 years ago, and some of which she makes herself out of an exquisite collection of beads, mostly rainbows of opals. So, there’s an image, for you. She’s decided she enjoys the fashions of Novigrad, so there may be some upcoming augmentations of her wardrobe.) 

ANYHOW. Down to Witchering.

Properly lubricated with alcohol, we embarked upon a little tour of the monster nests of Velen, “through the Lands of Difficulty,” as DF termed it-- all the shit he uncovered whilst too low-level to make it worthwhile. Since we were down there, we figured we’d clear all that out, get whatever loot and XP the place had to offer at the current level, and then move on with the Plot Shit. 

We had not really missed Velen’s fight music. See, when Geralt’s involved in a fight, the music changes, and in different places it plays different music, and in Velen it’s this music we call The Hollering, because it has a lot of lyric-less vocal stuff including some stuff that’s kind of hoarse? (Ah, it’s called Silver for Monsters but this is the extended track, the one they actually play really starts at like, the 2 minute mark of the linked video. and like, fine, it’s cool or whatever but after hours of playing you’re kind of like Ah Fuck It’s The Hollering.)

We found a bandit camp based in a half-ruined building that was leaning crazily over. We killed the guys on the ground and then DF got excited to try killing bandits by Aarding them off the top floor, so he ran up there. (There’s an achievement you can get, for killing a number of enemies by aarding them off things. We haven’t got one yet, but there’s time.)

Unfortunately, it wasn’t high enough to kill a level 9 bandit, so Geralt just Aarded him off the building and he was like “ARGH FUCK” and then started shooting arrows up at us. The other one, we just sworded until he mostly fell off but then he died weirdly half-clipped through the edge of the floor and just hung there by his wrist. DF went down to the ground and tried to crossbow him down but that was it, he was just forever going to hang there. It was super weird.

Another scene-setting thing: throughout all of this, DF is treating us to a very professional analysis of the different methods of Coronavirus testing being offered and what they do and do not mean and what they are and are not useful for; his conclusion basically boiled down to that they are useless for an individual and one can make absolutely zero decisions based on one’s own results, BUT they are essential at a population level for analysis and are essential to get-- just, don’t actually, like, rely on them for yourself, they’re not going to do you much if any good. 

Anyway. After the bandits we swung through a cluster of four Nekker nests, just... clearing them out. We needed a single Nekker heart for some potion or decoction or whatever. We wound up with another bushel basket of assorted bits. 

In the middle of this we stumbled across an isolated man who was moaning that the monsters wouldn’t kill him. He was familiar, but hideously deformed by gross pox boil-lookin things. He identified himself: he was the carter we’d encountered aeons ago, carting plague corpses, and Geralt had urgently told him to burn all his clothes and his cart. He’d been unconcerned, but clearly now had caught the plague. He begged Geralt to kill him; he was horribly sick and couldn’t die and had spread plague to everyone he loved. Geralt contemplated it for a moment, and DF said, “you know, this has nothing to do with my medical practice, okay” and agreed to kill him. The man, grateful, gave him a purse of coins, which he’d been saving for his children but now didn’t need. Aww! 😢 Geralt, of course, made it quick, and off-screen mercifully, and then used Igni on the remains. 

As we left, there was-- well, it looked like a person, in a hayfield, and MM cheerfully started singing the chorus of The Gallant Forty Twa [link is to the clancy bros rendition, on youtube]. “Strollin’ through the green fields, on a summer’s day, watchin’ all the country girls workin’ a’ the hay, I really was delighted--” and then the figure in the field straightened up and leapt at us and she was like “AH SHIT THAT’S NOT A COUNTRY GIRL” because, of course, it was yet another nekker, as the countryside was absolutely rotten with them. 

We headed for another question mark which we expected to be probably a fifth nekker nest, and suddenly were confronted with-- what the fuck is-- oh it’s a wyvern we’ve OH NO THAT’S A LEVEL 28 WYVERN RUN AWAY

OH FUCK IT HAS A GIRLFRIEND WHO IS ALSO LEVEL 28

we scrambled down the hill, to an unknown marker, a cave, let’s go in here DF said, and ran into the cave and the wyvern followed us and I was like THAT’S ITS FUCKING DEN and he was like AH FUCK and turned and ran back out dodging like crazy and the thing was following us ARGH

We ran a distance, and the fucking things were following, and we ran some more and they were still following and DF was like “Fuckit I’m a get into the sea” and ran and dove into the water and swam underwater for a while and the red dot was STILL FOLLOWING and in fact we could occasionally see one of the wyverns as it fucking circled overhead. “What the fuck,” DF said, coming up for air and then going back down.

We swam the entire strait underwater, and the wyverns were still following. We got out on the other side. “Maybe these bandits will fight the wyverns,” DF said, harassed, navigating Geralt into the Unknown Settlement. No bandits appeared, but a number of level 11 ghouls came out to play. DF tried to get into the door of a structure but the ghouls clustered around and the fucking door was locked, and the wyvern swooped. “What the fuck!”

He turned and ran back down to the water, where there were some drowners but they were slightly out of range. The wyvern dove angrily but missed. “Well,” he said, “let’s try the boat,” and got into a boat. At first the controller would not let him do anything but swish his sword around, but eventually he managed to figure out how to pilot the boat.

With the wyvern stooping angrily around us, we set off in the boat for a little tour of the coast, and promptly hit a rock, but fortunately didn’t sink.

It took another minute for the wyvern to back off. “We’re taking the wyverns on a tour of the coast by boat,” DF said. Sure enough, we could tell now that it was definitely both wyverns chasing. Miraculously, we had taken no damage, by sheer virtue of not holding still long enough. 

Finally, finally, the fight music turned off, and the wyverns disappeared, presumably back to their nest that we’d blundered straight into. “The fight music,” I said, “instead of The Hollering, probably should have been Yakety Sax.”

“That would’ve been a bit more fitting,” DF said, steering the boat back toward shore. “Uhhh... Okay,” DF said, “so, uh, where are we now and where are the things we were planning to do??”

Well, we’d intended to do The Volunteer. So we pulled that quest back up, it’s near the bridge to Oxenfurt and we weren’t far from that. 

I’m going to cut this post off and finally make it, though, and I’ll do the rest in a later post since this one’s so delayed anyway. ALSO Tumblr just tried its level best to eat this fucking post and i’m super over the way the wifi in this house likes to attempt to murder me.